Millennium Musings

The coming of September makes me introspective. This is a condition I have had for as long as I remember. I think, perhaps, it's a holdover from school days when September meant an end to the playful days of summer and a turning of the mind towards more thoughtful pursuits. But maybe it's biological. The consciousness of the shortening days, the harvest, the chill in the night air, all alert some vestigial bone in my body, some otherwise dormant brain cell that it is time to pull in, wrap myself up, muse on the year, and get ready for the long winter's night. This year those musings are more introspective than ever. Because of the ending of the Century, of course. And the long winter's night is the new Millennium.

One of the things occupying my thoughts is violence. In the U.S. not a day passes without a violent occurrence, most often more than one. The media calls many of them to our attention, so we have become more aware than ever of the violence we do to one another. Just this year we have seen two high school students go on a rampage, killing a teacher and killing and wounding classmates. We heard of a man going into a community center and shooting and wounding several small children and of another man shooting day traders, after bludgeoning his wife and children to death and before killing himself. Every day in every urban paper we can read about family violence. A woman disappears and is later found dead, locked in a trunk. Further investigation shows she had a fight with her boyfriend and had decided to leave him. These are only representations of the individual violence we inflict upon one another. Any reader can add his or her own examples.

We are overwhelmed. So we look to place blame and find scapegoats. Violent movies and television shows are the cause, we say. Working mothers. Inattentive fathers. A permissive curriculum. No God in the schools – that is, no Judeo-Christian, white-bearded, father God. Having guns - or not enough people having guns. Drugs. Alcohol. Eating meat. Smoking cigarettes. Comic books. Pool.

Pool?

Okay. I'm getting carried away. But there is an absurdity in our blame-placing. Before television and movies became ubiquitous, blame really was placed on comic books. And before that, as well-parodied in the musical comedy, The Music Man, it was playing Pool that would lead your children, especially your boy children, down the path toward evil (girls were assumed to be too passive to have adults worry about their being violent).

It seems to me that in attributing blame we make two mistakes. First, we are placing blame on surface causes and not looking at the underlying roots. Second, we assume, without taking a good hard look, that violence is increasing.

What are the underlying roots of violence? Where does it come from? In this country we don't have far to look. Our country was born in violence. Even before the Revolution, early Europeans wiped out whole settlements of Indians - mostly out of fear, sometimes out of greed – and vice-versa. Under the color of law and religion, the witch-craze wrought its own violence, especially on women. The Revolution brought more bloodshed, although, as would turn out to be our history whenever we got into a war, it was an approved bloodshed and not called violence but honor.

Other wars and violent skirmishes marked the next 80 or so years. And through those years wound the terrible violence against a whole people that was called slavery. Slave owners had the right of life and death over those they owned. Any slave could be killed for a reason or a whim. Families were torn apart. Women and girls were raped. Human beings could be sent to sugar plantations in the West Indies where death from overworking was a near certainty. And it was all within the law. Legally, it was not violence.

At the same time, women were property, and, especially in the South on wealthy plantations, husbands and fathers were able to exercise the right of life and death over their wives and daughters. Not much was done about it, especially if the man had a "good' reason. All through the country, the good wife was supposed to demur to her husband. If he beat her, it was his prerogative - so long as it was according to the rule of thumb. [Ed. Note: the diameter of the beating rod could be no larger than the man's thumb.] And none called it violence.

The Civil War was the ultimate in violence, leaving the land it touched soaked in blood. Then followed the extermination of the North American Indians and their violent removal from their land. On the heels of that atrocity done in the name of Manifest Destiny came the Spanish -American War. None of that was called violence. All was done for honor and God and Country.

During that time and well past the middle of this Century, black people, although free, were still subject to violence. Men, who convinced themselves the women liked it, raped black women. Black men were lynched - for any reason, but often because they had looked at a white woman or talked to a white woman or because lynching a black man was acceptable. The fact that a woman had consensual sex with a man not her husband was not. In fact, lynchings were so widespread that Mark Twain was motivated to write an essay called "The United States of Lyncherdom."

As the industrial revolution took hold, new people came to the country and were subjected to violence for being different. As each new group came, the violence was passed down: English against the Irish, Irish against the Italians, Italians against the Puerto Ricans, Puerto Ricans against the Cubans. Each in their own way against the Jews - no matter who were the first arrivals. But individual street violence and local discrimination were minor compared to the violence in the workplace.

Owners and management used police to keep the workers in line. When unions were involved, the violence escalated, and it wasn't unusual to have bloodshed at work -- heads bashed in, people shot. As the Century progressed, we found ourselves training for war again, and we thought it was patriotic to have men willing to kill or be killed "to make the world safe for democracy."

Soon after, we found ourselves in the street war of what was called "organized crime." It wasn't unusual in some parts of the country to have shootings on the street, assassinations of rival gang members, tommy-gun blasts into barbershops and speakeasies. Here was open violence that wasn't legal and did not operate under the color of law. But it did operate in some quarters with the cooperation of some in law enforcement and the judicial system and with a wink and a nod by some in the media. Then, once again, we were in a time of war preparations, a time to train our young men to learn how to kill.

After the War, after all this time, our black people were still subject to violence. One day a young black man from Chicago by the name of Emmett Till was killed for talking to a white woman when he was visiting down south. What was unusual was that it made the news. A few years later, television cameras captured a southern police chief ordering dogs to attack black people demonstrating for their rights. The news also reported the killing of Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit who had gone down south to work for civil rights. These events were no longer incidences of violence under color of law, but there were always reasons why they weren't exactly against the law. Till should have known his place. The demonstrators should have obeyed the police. Liuzzo should have stayed home to care for her children.

It took southern church bombings that killed little children and the assassination of President Kennedy and Dr. King and Robert Kennedy to call our attention to the fact that we may be a violent country. It took Kent State to make us see that we were killing our own children under color of law. It took the Vietnam War to raise our consciousness to the idea that solving our problems through war may not be honorable after all.

And what of serial or random killers? Speck killed nurses in Chicago. Whitman climbed a tower in Texas and sniped away at the trapped people below. Manson and his followers massacred their victims. Son of Sam preyed on couples. Gacy lured young boys into his Chicago home, killed them and buried them in his cellar. Bundy used his good looks and a ploy to get women to help him and then raped and killed them. Dahmer picked up his victims and brought them to his home. There were the Hillside Strangler, the Trailside Killer, and hundreds more notorious nationally or known to locals throughout the land.

That's only a brief look at our history, but it brings us back to the second question. Is violence increasing? Oh, I'm sure crime statistics will show that it is. But if we honestly assessed the real historical record, would we come to the same conclusion? How many slave deaths were recorded as a crime? How many lynchings of black men; how many rapes of black women? How many deaths of Union organizers and strikers? How many wife-beatings were crimes? (I always think of that statistic about the great number of accidents in the kitchen or bathroom and wonder how many of them really were slips in the tub.)

If violence has always been with us, what makes it such a hot topic now? Probably much of the violence that we used to know was contained within subcultures, and the mainstream did not see it as affecting them at all. Now, with the easy access to transportation and to guns with incredible firepower, violence can happen quickly and anywhere. Additionally, we have unprecedented access to the media and know about incidents that might have traditionally made it only to a small column on the back pages of the local newspaper. Clearly violence is not something that has just descended on our land as some Millennium plague. The tragedy of the end of the Millennium, though, is that we still are a violent people.

So, having said all this, how do we end it? We end violence by making a commitment to end it. And there, my fellow and sister Seekers, is the rub. I believe it was Professor Einstein who said "We cannot both prevent and prepare for war." We need to expand on his statement to say "We cannot both prevent and prepare for violence."

This means, of course, we have to learn how to solve our problems without resorting to violence before we can point the finger at others who do. This means we have to look clearly at the causes of war and decide whether, in the next Century, the next Millennium, we will continue to wage war because of boredom or greed or aggression or because of no other tenable solutions.

I know we really want to end some violence; our increased identification of certain activities such as child-beating and spousal abuse as crimes show that we do. But I am not sure we are quite at the point where we are ready to make a commitment to end all violence. I am encouraged, though, by the fact that in the national consciousness we are admitting that we do have a problem. If each of us can now turn that awareness toward looking at real causes and not just placing blame in order to gain a temporary fix, we may be able to end the tragedy of violence. When we are each ready to make that commitment, we will.